Break, Blow, Burn
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems is a 2005 study of poetry by Camille Paglia. The book contains full texts of the 43 poems, each followed by an essay. The title is from a line in "Holy Sonnet XIV" by John Donne. It was named as one of the "New York Times Notable Books of the Year" for 2005, and was on the bestseller lists for Amazon.com, Booksense, The New York Times, The Northern California Independent Booksellers Association and the Toronto Globe & Mail.
In this book, she wrote essays on poems by the following poets: William Shakespeare, John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Frank O'Hara, Paul Blackburn, May Swenson, Gary Snyder, Norman H. Russell, Chuck Wachtel, Rochell Kraut, Wanda Coleman, Ralph Pomeroy, and Joni Mitchell
While speaking at events during the 2006 promotional tour for the paperback version of her book, she attacked the positive reputations that poets John Ashbery and Jorie Graham have enjoyed in academe. Of Graham she said, "Maybe she had some talent early on... She is like a mirror to the professors; they look into her and see themselves."
She also spoke of how she regretted not including poems by Allen Ginsberg in the book, since she has been a fan of his since reading "Howl". She said that she tried to excerpt the first hundred lines of "Howl", but that it gave the wrong impression of the work. The poem also did not entirely meet her standards. As she told a reporter for the Toronto Star: "'Howl', when I reread it, came across as so garish, stagey, hammy. It didn't work for this book."
